Originally poster on 05May10 to IBM Developerworks (13,014 Views)
Gridit is a Finnish company that is providing online retail services which was only founded in 2009. They are owned by nine local network providers. Think of them as an aggregated application store that sells a broad range of services and products from those nine network companies as well as third party content providers. They plan to sell services and content such as:
- Music
- Games
- e-books
- Access
- Data storage
- Information Security
- Home services
- VoIP
- IPTV
They do not make exclusive agreements with the content/service providers and provide their customers with freedom of choice. For Gridit, the customer is king – they will seek out new content providers if there is demand from the customers. Gridit also interact with local network providers and 3rd party content providers giving the customers a single point of contact and billing for the services that they resell.
What Gridit are providing is pretty similar to an app store solution we deployed last year in Vietnam which was also a joint venture by a number of Telcos and a bank which provided a retail online store for products and services from those communications providers as well as 3rd party content providers except that Gridit are also offering a hosted wholesale service – I could go to Gridit and build my new company ‘Larmourcom’ and offer products and services from a range of providers that Gridit front end for Larmourcom. Gridit can stand up an online commerce portal for Larmourcom and also provide an interface to the back end providers to allow for traditional and non-traditional service assurance, fulfilment and billing processes.
To achieve this abstraction from the back end providers, Gridit have used WebSphere Telecom Content Pack to provide an architectural framework and accelerator for all of those services. IBM has helped Gridit to map those processes as defined within the TeleManagement Forum’s standards (eTOM, TAM, SID) and map them to the lower level processes to wherever the content or services come from.
Like the Vietnamese app store, Gridit are also using WebSphere Commerce to provide the online commerce and catalogue. For Gridit, the benefits they expect to see (as a result of a Business Value Assessment that was conducted) was 48% faster time to value by using Dynamic BPM and Telecom Content Pack versus a traditional BPM model. That is real business value and a great story for both Gridit and IBM.
